Abby McGanney Nolan
THE WASHINGTON POST – Alberta, age 12, has lived in the small California town of Ewing Beach since she was a toddler and has had the same best friend, Laramie, since she was nine-years-old. But as Alberta gets ready to start seventh grade, she has the strange feeling that “things are changing too quickly and not quickly enough”.
Her father still say she can’t compete in surfing competitions until next year. And Alberta’s least-favourite person in the world, an eighth-grade neighbour named Nicolette, is as mean as ever. Which makes it even more confusing when Laramie starts hanging out with her.
On the positive side, Alberta and her parents are pleasantly surprised when a Black mother and her 12-year-old daughter, Edie, move into the bed-and-breakfast across the street. In an overwhelmingly White town, where Alberta said “even most of the tourists are White”, she will no longer be the only Black student in seventh grade.
The two girls get along well, even though Edie misses Brooklyn, the part of New York City where she grew up, and doesn’t seem interested in Alberta’s favourite activity, surfing. When Edie finds a box of journals in her new bedroom, she invites Alberta to help piece together the stories within them and figure out who wrote them 65 years ago. Alberta and Edie carry on their research in secret, hoping to solve the mystery without adult help or interference.
Journal entries are sprinkled throughout the book, spurring readers to see if they can figure out what was kept hidden so long ago.
Throughout the two months described in The Only Black Girls in Town author Brandy Colbert follows Alberta as she deals with some other changes, too. Alberta isn’t sure, for instance, what to expect when Denise, her biological mother, comes to stay a few weeks before she’s due to have a baby.
Alberta realises that she’s growing up and tries to see the people around her more clearly than she had before. She also wants to be appreciated for the person she’s becoming. How will she deal with the inevitable misunderstandings that happen when you’re making a new friend and trying to keep an old one?
Alberta has to navigate occasionally rough waters, but it helps to have a great support system and an endless supply of waves.
